Don't edit LocalSettings.php with document editors like Notepad, TextEdit, or other text editor that adds byte order marks to files. These break the PHP runtime of your wiki. Instead, use a code editor. E.g. Vim, Notepad++, or Atom. These handle file encodings properly. They can also be used to repair files previously broken by document editors.

The LocalSettings.php file provides basic configuration settings (based on the DefaultSettings.php file) of a MediaWiki installation. You should take your time to review the settings in this file. The file is usually generated by the web-based MediaWiki installer but you can tweak the parameters, possibly in concert with Apache settings. For MediaWiki installations configured as a wiki farm, a file named CommonSettings.php may be used.

Location on the server

The LocalSettings.php file is not a wiki page and you cannot access it with your web browser. Instead, it is a file in the file system of the server. Its contents are generated during the initial setup of the wiki and the resulting file must be copied on the server manually. The file must be located in the folder you installed MediaWiki into, on the same level with folders like includes/and skins/ and files like api.php. If this file is not there, the wiki will not work at all - if the wiki does work, the file is there. If you do not know where it is, you can enter a command such as find / -iname LocalSettings.php -print in a terminal window to locate it.

Security

LocalSettings.php usually contains sensitive data such as database logins. This data should never be revealed to the public! Due to a security breach somewhere on the server, it might happen that other users are able to view the contents of files. In order to improve security of your data, you should set UNIX permissions for this file accordingly: The webserver user must have access to this file. If this is the same account, who is the owner of the file, then you can set permissions to 600. Sometimes, the webserver user is not the file owner, but he is in the owner's UNIX user group. In this case, permissions of 640 should be fine. For improved security you should narrow permissions down as far as possible.

Additionally, you can create a MySQL user, who is restricted to only the database used by the wiki and provide this user's credentials in LocalSettings.php. Also you can configure your database server to only accept connections from localhost - this should prevent access from outside in case of leaked credentials.

File contents

When you edit LocalSettings.php, make sure to save it in the right encoding again. You should use "ANSI as UTF-8" encoding - that is UTF-8 encoding without byte order mark (BOM).

LocalSettings.php contains PHP code; mainly the definition of variables and their values. Changing a setting usually means changing the value of a PHP variable. Your changes will take effect immediately after saving the file again on the server: There is no need to manually "restart" anything. Anyway, in some cases you may need to clear your browser's cache to actually see the changes you made.

The default values of many more settings are set in includes/DefaultSettings.php, which should not be edited; if the variable you want to change is not already mentioned in your LocalSettings.php, copy the appropriate line from DefaultSettings.php and modify it appropriately in LocalSettings.php. Within LocalSettings.php you can add new lines at the end.

Within the file, there can also be several lines such as 'require_once "$IP/extensions/extension.php";', which point to extensions. These lines enable the according extension in the wiki. Those extensions may require setting the values of more variables in LocalSettings.php; check the documentation of the according extension for further instructions.

Note: In MediaWiki 1.16 and earlier it was important to not place extensions before the require_once"includes/DefaultSettings.php"; line; that will blank the extension setup function arrays, causing no extensions to be installed, and probably making your wiki inaccessible. Since 1.17 it's no longer necessary for LocalSettings.php to include DefaultSettings.php.

Like most PHP files in MediaWiki, LocalSettings.php does not end with the closing PHP tag ?>. This prevents admins from accidentally adding new information after this tag. PHP works fine without a closing tag.

If you have a wiki on a MediaWiki wiki farm you may not have write-access (perhaps not even read-access) to the file LocalSettings.php (see e.g.[1]). The wiki farm company may or may not be willing to make changes you desire. Perhaps it wants to keep most settings the same on all wikis of the wiki farm.

Before 1.17, this file was automatically generated by the installer script and placed in the config folder. As of 1.17, this file is no longer written to your webserver for security reasons. It is now offered as a download, which you must then upload to your server for your wiki to begin working. For a more complete explanation, see this explanation.

Overview of available settings

See the configuration settings index and the comments included in the settings files for help on what all the variables do. A short listing of the most important variables, as well as the most requested features, is listed below.

Standard settings

Include path

The $IP (include path) variable holds the local file path to the base installation of your wiki. Since MediaWiki 1.17, MediaWiki is setting $IP automatically - setting it manually in LocalSettings.php is no longer needed. It will default to the current working directory automatically and can be used without the need to manually define it.

Site name

$wgSitenameManual:$wgSitename holds the name of your wiki setup. This name gets included many times throughout the system, such as via MediaWiki:Pagetitle. For instance, the Wikipedia tagline "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" makes use of this setting.

Site language

$wgLanguageCodeManual:$wgLanguageCode controls the language of your wiki's interface. While users can switch the language they see in their preferences, this variable sets the default language that all anonymous users and most registered users see.

Server name

$wgServerManual:$wgServer can be used optionally to overwrite the automatic detection. When the wiki is accessed from either the localhost where it runs, from an intranet or from the internet, e-mail notifications and a few other computed messages would be usually delivered with the different URLs. Using $wgServer overwrites the detection and the server name will be constant.

If www.example.com is the server address of your wiki as seen from the internet, add a line such as

$wgServer='http://www.example.com';

The magic word variable {{SERVER}} can be used on wiki pages; it equals the value of $wgServer; however, on a wiki, such as those in the WikiMedia family, where relative urls are used, it will not fully expand, for example here it displays //www.mediawiki.org, which can neither be clicked nor copy-pasted into the address bar as it is.

Script name

$wgScriptManual:$wgScript is the name of the main (index) MediaWiki PHP script, named index.php by default. Changing the script name is probably not a good idea. However, if you feel the urge to do so, this is the place to make your changes. Make sure you know what you are doing.

Redirect script name

$wgRedirectScriptManual:$wgRedirectScript specifies the URL path to the redirect script which handles redirects in MediaWiki. This setting is similar to wgScript as you can configure the exact name of the script. As mentioned above, this is probably not a good idea unless you really know what you are doing.

Article path

$wgArticlePathManual:$wgArticlePath is the path to use when accessing a page in MediaWiki. The path should contain the path to the main script (usually making use of $wgScript) and use the $1 placeholder for the article name.

If you are using Apache rewrite rules to create pretty and short URLs, you probably need to adjust $wgArticlePath to address the right path. Note that wgArticlePath is used to construct URLs from within MediaWiki. If you make a mistake here, internal links will show up incorrectly while you still may be able to access the main page by specifying the correct URL manually. See Manual:Short URL for more information on URL configuration.

Typical values are:

"$wgScript/$1"

pass the article name with separator "/"

"$wgScript?title=$1"

pass the article name as a parameter (old style)

"/mypath/$1"

custom path. Use Apache rewrite rules to convert "mypath" to the proper path accessing the main script

Logo

$wgLogoManual:$wgLogo specifies which graphical logo is displayed in the top left corner of all mediawiki pages. These steps replace the default logo in the /wiki/skins/common/images/ directory, replacing /wiki with the path to the directory where you installed the MediaWiki software.

First, copy whatever logo you want into the /wiki/skins/common/images/ directory (replacing /wiki with the path to the directory where you installed the MediaWiki software).

Next, try to find the line that looks like this in LocalSettings.php:

$wgLogo="{$wgStylePath}/common/images/wiki.png";

If there's no such line, you can copy and paste the line above at the end of the file.

Then, modify that line to point to your logo. The logo must be web accessible. The value of this variable is passed to the web browser, which uses it to fetch the logo. If in doubt, a good way to pick what to put here is navigate to the logo in your web browser (for example, this wiki the url of the logo is http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/mediawiki/b/bc/Wiki.png ), and put the full url as the value of this variable.

Some people just replace the skins/common/images/wiki.png file with their logo. This is not recommended, as the customized logo would be overwritten on upgrade.

Contact info

$wgEmergencyContactManual:$wgEmergencyContact is the e-mail address of the user to contact if something goes wrong. This e-mail address is used to send internal bug reports to. As an administrator, you want to include your e-mail address here.

$wgPasswordSenderManual:$wgPasswordSender is the e-mail address where e-mail gets sent from, when passwords are sent out to users who have forgotten their passwords. Choose an address people can reply to in case of trouble or confusion.

Database settings

MediaWiki needs access to the database (currently either MySQL or PostgreSQL) to store pages, modifications, user information, and a lot more things.

$wgDBserverManual:$wgDBserver contains the hostname where the database is hosted on. In most cases this will be just "localhost" as the database is run on the same system, but for distributed installations, you need to fill in the fully qualified domain name of the computer running the database.

$wgDBnameManual:$wgDBname is the database name of the database to be used by MediaWiki. A single MySQL or PostgreSQL installation can store more than one database and you can even run many MediaWiki installations on a single server. Make sure you have stated the correct database name here and use different database names for different wiki installations on the same database server.

User rights

$wgGroupPermissionsManual:$wgGroupPermissions is an associative array, controlling permissions for creating and editing pages for your different user groups. In this array, custom permission levels can be created, and permission levels for the different user groups can be set. See Help:User rights for more information about the different permissions and user groups available.

Force capital links

By default, no page name can start with a lowercase Roman letter: in an attempt to do so the first letter is converted to uppercase; if a link target, included page, image or category is specified with a name starting with a lowercase letter, the actual target etc. is the page starting with the corresponding capital.

Alternatively page names can start with a lowercase letter, in addition to the possibilities of starting with a capital, a digit, etc. For that you must adjust $wgCapitalLinksManual:$wgCapitalLinks. Setting it to false allows lowercase characters, true chooses the default behavior.

Image uploads

Before users are allowed to upload files to the MediaWiki system, you have to enable that feature. Make sure the Upload Directory is properly configured and writeable by the Apache web server process. Then set $wgEnableUploadsManual:$wgEnableUploads to true to allow uploading in the web user interface.

i.e. Here's some example code from includes/DefaultSettings.php to put in LocalSettings.php:

$wgUploadPath="$wgScriptPath/uploads";## Wiki 1.5 defaults to /images, but allows more than just images$wgUploadDirectory="$IP/uploads";## Wiki 1.5 defaults to /images, but allows more than just images## To enable image uploads, make sure the above '$wgUploadPath' directory is writable by Apache User or group.## ''(i.e. chmod og+w uploads images)'' then the following should be true:$wgEnableUploads=true;$wgUseImageMagick=true;$wgImageMagickConvertCommand="/usr/bin/convert";## If you want to use image uploads under safe mode, create the directories images/archive, images/thumb and## images/temp, and make them all writable. Then uncomment this, if it's not already uncommented:$wgHashedUploadDirectory=false;

Interwiki support

InterWiki support is built into MediaWiki but you need to configure the prefix to be used for your internal links. This prefix is usually the same as $wgSitename, but in case you need to change that, you set the $wgLocalInterwiki variable to the preferred name.

Language of user interface

MediaWiki allows for a variety of localized user interfaces languages instead of the English default. If you want to run your wiki in a non-English language, set the $wgLanguageCode variable to the proper language code (e.g. "de" for German, "es" for Spanish, etc.)

You may use any of the languages with a file in the directory languages/i18n. E.g. if you find es.json, then you can use "es" for Spanish. Do not use "Es" with a capital letter. Although it seems to work, not all texts are translated.

Note: After changing the language code, you will need to run a PHP script to make it work. In a terminal window, change to your wiki directory, change to the maintenance folder, and enter php rebuildMessages.php --rebuild. On Windows, the PHP folder might not be in your PATH environment variable and you'll have to prefix php with the path to the program.

Not all languages are supported. See here for a list of the localisation statistics of 1.29.0-wmf.5 (f8bbdfc). See translatewiki.net for the statistics per released version.

Note: If $wgRightsPage is non-empty, the link in the copyright/license notice will link to that page on your site. If $wgRightsPage is empty then the copyright/license notice will link to $wgRightsUrl instead.

To modify the copyright statements of the site, add something like this to LocalSettings.php:

<arel="license"href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"><imgalt="Creative Commons License"border="0"src="http://creativecommons.org/images/public/somerights30.png"/></a>
This work is licensed under a
<arel="license"href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/">
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License</a>.

For $wgRightsURL enter the href info from the first anchor:

$wgRightsUrl="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/";

For $wgRightsText enter the text the second anchor links from (add the "a" to the Wiki variable for a more grammatically correct version)